Bill Heffernan (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

that they only need to buy the water to return the water to the system. Let the National Parks Fund buy the land if they want to turn it into a national park. The same goes for Queensland. There is absolutely no case to be made for buying properties to return water to the system. What has to happen is that they have to become compliant with the National Water Initiative like the rest of Australia.

We are about to make the same mistakes in the Northern Territory on the Douglas Daly. There are companies up there now that are being issued authorisations to take groundwater. The work on the aquifer is not complete. In a few years time they will say, ‘Hang on, we have this authorisation; you better give us the licence now.’ If I was in charge, I would be making them buy the licence. All the licences up there are Christmas gifts. We are about to give them Christmas gifts and then spend several hundred million dollars buying them back.

I do not have time today to go through the technical detail of why this is all so—it is not the appropriate forum—but I say this: this is not a matter of politics. This is a matter of being fair dinkum about managing the future. We can probably double the production of the Murray-Darling Basin with half the water if we go to better technology, and we need to do that. But the first thing we need to do is get the Commonwealth to assert its authority—because obviously the rivers do not stop at the borders—and get all the interested parties into one room to take a look at it.